Blog it forward – Vitaliy Rudnytskiy

Hello! Привіт! Cześć!

This blog is a part of the “Blog It Forward” challenge. I’ve been BIFed twice already: first by Anne Hardy and then by Gregory Misiorek … both back in 2012. As the saying goes “Potiusque sero quam nunquam”, ie. better late then never, so here is my entry 🙂 At the break of a year I used to publish my predictions for SAP Analytics for next year. This time I write about myself (so selfish, isn’t it?)…

Intro:

I was born in the little town of Horodok in Ukraine, but have spent most of my life in the beautiful city of Wrocław in Poland. I do consider myself a bit of cosmopolitan, as in my short life (hey, my age is only two digits!) I used to live in two more other countries, and visited all continents except Australia. Ah, and Antarctica. But my teammate Craig Cmehil would be happy to bring SAP CodeJam to the coldest, driest, and windiest continent and then I’ll be happy to join as well.

My original name in Ukrainian is Віталій Сигизмундович Рудницький. Because Unicode is not yet wide-spread on earth, I became a “victim” of multiple Latin transliterations of my name. But be this Vitaliy Rudnytskiy or Witalij Rudnicki it is just me – a single person, no multiple personality disorder.

If you read Cyrilic then you found I used the middle part of my original name as a twitter handle @Sygyzmundovych.

Intermezzo:

I spent years doing very interesting job as an SAP consultant in the area analytics: starting with BW, going through BWA, adding BusinessObjects, and then helping with the first HP’s HANA implementation in the US. Those were great times: active with customer projects and as well here at SCN, where I became one of SAP Mentors and one of SAP HANA Distingushed Engineers.

Then I wanted to reduce travels and to be more involved with my kids, yet to not get chained to a desk in the office. I was lucky enough to join SAP’s Developer Relations team (which is running SAP Developer Center), currently under Thomas Grassl. It gave me a chance to balance my work and life, and yet to keep doing cool things: working internally on Developers 360 project and being an advocate of SAP technologies for external developers.

Externally I’ve been to about 20 developers events this year: between Lviv on the east, Dallas on the west, Tallinn on the north and Budapest on the south. Nothing can replace the joy of face to face interactions with technology enthusiasts!

Answering questions:

In his BIF entry Greg asked us to answer some questions. Let me try.

1. If there was no SAP, which software would you use to balance your ledger?

My ledger? Even today I am doing this (my family ledger) in Excel. Well, I had some thought to try SAP software for that, but first I would need to grow my family financial balance sheet significantly 😉

2. If there were no computers, how would you communicate about IT?

Then we would use some other language than English. For example a “computer” is “ЕОМ” in Ukrainian or “Ordinateur” in French 😉

3. If you were to choose a college degree today, which field would you choose and why?

I never went to college, as we had only universities 😉 But if I were back to university, I would choose software engineering again. I love it for intellectual challenges: turning needs into solutions and resolving problems. What hurts me though is how much brain power in software development is wasted IMHO on applications aimed on tricking customers to buy more, focused on advertisin, or adding no value at all. I wish developers do more applications making our world better.

I suppose using SAP to balance the family budget might seem like a bit of overkill, unless it’s a really big family. If there were no computers, why would we need to communicate about IT? Ah, il n’y a pas des “computers,” mais il y a des ordinateurs… 😉